Mathematics for the interested outsider

To complete what we were saying about the spaces, we need to show that they’re complete. As it turns out, we can adapt the proof that mean convergence is complete, but we will take a somewhat different approach. It suffices to show that for any sequence of functions in so that the series of -norms converges

In the case , we can write . Then except on some set of measure zero. The union of all the must also be negligible, and so we can throw it all out and just have . Now the series of the converges by assumption, and thus the series of the must converge to some function bounded by the sum of the (except on the union of the ).

We can actually extend what we’ve been doing with Hölder’s inequality and Minkowski’s inequality a little further. Given a metric space , we’ve already discussed the idea of an “essentially bounded” function — one for which there is some real constant so that for almost all . We will write for the collection of essentially bounded functions on the measure space. It should be clear that these form a vector space.

We also discussed the “essential supremum” of an essentially bounded function. We’ll now write this as , suggesting that it’s a norm. And it’s clear that , and that if and only if almost everywhere. Verifying the triangle identity is exactly Minkowski’s inequality.

And, indeed, we know that and a.e., so a.e., so whatever the least such essential upper bound is smaller still. That is, .

Now for Hölder’s inequality. For this purpose we consider , and thus , which means that and are Hölder-conjugates. Thus our assertion is that if is integrable and is essentially bounded, then is integrable and . Indeed, we know that , and so — both inequalities holding almost everywhere. From this, we conclude that

as we asserted. From now on, we’ll allow (and ) whenever we’re talking about a Hölder-conjugate pair or -space.

You might be expecting another “Sunday Sample” here today, as there have been for the last 187 weeks, but not today. And you’ll find that they don’t even exist here anymore!

What happened? They’ve all been moved (along with this week’s installment) to drmathochist.wordpress.com, which will be my place for more personal posts. I’ll also relax the filter there, so Dr. Friedman can quit complaining about self-censorship (and I can post Cee Lo Green’s new track!)

At the same time, I’ve just opened up The Unapologetic Programmer for my more computer-programming related posts. It’ll be much less organized than here, I’m sure, but I know there’s a bunch of people into that sort of thing here.

We continue our project to show that the spaces are actually Banach spaces with Minkowski’s inequality. This will allow us to conclude that is a normed vector space. It states that if and are both in , then their sum is in , and we have the inequality

We start by considering Hölder’s inequality in a toy space I’ll whip up right now. Take two isolated points, and let each one have measure ; the whole space of both points has measure . A function is just an assignment of a pair of real values , and integration just means adding them together. Hölder’s inequality for this space tells us that

where and are Hölder-conjugate to each other. We can set , , and and use this inequality to find

Dividing out and raising both sides to the th power, we conclude that . Thus if both and are integrable, then so is . Thus must be in .

Now we calculate

Dividing out by we find that

This lets us conclude that is a vector space. But we can also verify the triangle identity now. Indeed, if , , and are all in , then Minkowski’s inequality shows us that

which is exactly the triangle inequality we want. Thus is a norm, and is a normed vector space.

Given a real number , we define the space or to be the collection of all measurable functions for which is integrable. As in the case of , we identify two functions if they’re equal -almost everywhere.

It will turn out that these are Banach spaces. We define the norm

and we write to define a metric. This is clearly non-negative, and we see that if and only if -a.e., just as before. It’s also clear that . What we need to work to check is the triangle inequality. It’s also not quite so apparent a problem, but we actually don’t know yet that this is a vector space at all! That is, how do we know that is integrable if and are?

As a first step in this direction, we prove Hölder’s inequality: if and are real numbers greater than such that , and if and , then the product and . To see this, we will use the function defined for all positive real numbers by

Differentiating, we see that , so the only (positive) critical point of is . Since the limit as approaches and are both positive infinite, must be a local minimum. That is

For any two real numbers and , we can consider the value

and it follows that

and thus

which is clearly also true even if we allow or to be zero. This is known as “Young’s inequality”.

Okay, so now we can turn to the theorem itself. If either or , the inequality clearly holds. Otherwise, we define

we can plug these into the above inequality to find

Since the measurability of and implies that of , and the right hand side of this inequality is integrable, we conclude that is integrable. If we integrate, we find

and Hölder’s inequality follows.

The condition relating and is very common in this discussion, so we will say that such a pair of real numbers are “Hölder conjugates” of each other. Given , the Hölder conjugate is uniquely defined by , which is a strictly decreasing function sending to itself (with order reversed, of course). The fact that this function has a (unique) fixed point at will be important. In particular, we will see that this norm is associated with an inner product on , and that Hölder’s inequality actually implies the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality!

Let be the unit interval , let be the class of Borel sets on , and let be Lebesgue measure. If is a sequence of partitions of the maximal element of the measure algebra into intervals, and if the limit of the sequence of norms is zero, then is dense.

If is a positive number, then we can find some so that . If is a subinterval of , then let be the unique interval containing the left endpoint of . If also contains the right endpoint, then we can stop. Otherwise, let be the next interval of to the right of , and keep going (at most a finite number of steps) until we get to an interval containing the right endpoint of . The union of all the can overshoot by at most on the left and the same amount on the right, and so . Thus any interval can be approximated arbitrarily closely by some partition in the sequence. The general result follows, because we can always find a finite collection of intervals whose union is arbitrarily close to any given Borel set.

Now, say that every separable, non-atomic, normalized measure algebra is isomorphic to the measure ring .

Since the metric space has a diameter of — no two sets can differ by more than , and — we can find a dense sequence in the space. For each we can consider sets of the form

where either or . The collection of all such sets for a given is a partition . It should be clear that the sequence is decreasing, and the fact that is dense implies that the sequence of partitions is also dense. We thus conclude that .

The first partition has two elements and . We can define and , so that and . This gives us a partition of that reflects the structure of . Similarly, we can carve up each of these intervals so that the resulting partition reflects the structure of . And we can continue, each time subdividing into smaller intervals so that the next partition reflects the structure of . Since this correspondence preserves measures, it follows that , and the above result then shows that the sequence is dense.

Now, we can extend from partition elements occurring in to finite unions of such elements by sending such a finite union to the finite union of corresponding elements of . This gives an isometry from a dense subset of to a dense subset of . Thus we can uniquely extend it to an isometry . Since preserves unions and differences, and since these operations are uniformly continuous, it follows that gives us an isomorphism of measure algebras.

We define a “partition” of an element to be a finite set of “disjoint” elements of whose “union” is . Remember, of course, that the elements of are not (necessarily) sets, so the set language is suggestive, but not necessarily literal. That is, if then and

The “norm” of a partition is the maximum of the numbers . If is a partition of and if is any element of below , then is a partition of .

If and are partitions, then we write if each element in is contained in an element of . We say that a sequence of partitions is “decreasing” if for each . A sequence of partitions is “dense” if for every and every positive number there is some and an element so that , and is exactly the union of some elements in . That is, we can use the elements in a fine enough partition in the sequence to approximate any element of as closely as we want.

Now, if is a totally finite, non-atomic measure algebra, and if is a dense, decreasing sequence of partitions of , then . Indeed, the sequence of norms is monotonic and bounded in the interval , and so it must have a limit. We will assume that this limit is some positive number , and find a contradiction.

So if then at least one of the must be big enough that for all . Otherwise the sequence of norms would descend below and that couldn’t be the limit. Let be just such an element, and consider the sequence of partitions of . The same argument is just as true, and we find another element from the partition , and so on.

Now, let be the intersection of the sequence . By assumption, each of the has , and so as well. Since is non-atomic, can’t be an atom, and so there must be an with . This element must be either contained in or disjoint from each element of each partition .

We can take smaller than either or . Now no set made up of the union of any elements of any partition can have a distance less than from . This shows that the sequence of partitions cannot be dense, which is the contradiction we were looking for. Thus the limit of the sequence of norms is zero.

The Stone space functor we’ve been working with sends Boolean algebras to topological spaces. Specifically, it sends them to compact Hausdorff spaces. There’s another functor floating around, of course, though it might not be the one you expect.

The clue is in our extended result. Given a topological space we define to be the Boolean algebra of all clopen subsets. This functor is contravariant — given a continuous map , we get a homomorphism of Boolean algebras sending the clopen set to its preimage . It’s straightforward to see that this preimage is clopen. Another surprise is that this is known as the “Stone functor”, not to be confused with the Stone space functor .

So what happens when we put these two functors together? If we start with a Boolean algebra and build its Stone space , then the Stone functor applied to this space gives us a Boolean algebra . This is, by construction, isomorphic to itself. Thus the category is contravariantly equivalent to some subcategory of . But which compact Hausdorff spaces arise as the Stone spaces of Boolean algebras?

Look at the other composite; starting with a topological space , we find the Boolean algebra of its clopen subsets, and then the Stone space of this Boolean algebra. We also get a function . For each point we define the Boolean algebra homomorphism that sends a clopen set to if and only if . We can see that this is a continuous map by checking that the preimage of any basic set is open. Indeed, a basic set of is for some clopen set . That is, . Which functions of the form are in ? Exactly those for which . Since is clopen, this preimage is open.

Two points and are sent to the same function if and only if every clopen set containing also contains , and vice versa. That is, and must be in the same connected component. Indeed, if they were in different connected components, then there would be some clopen containing one but not the other. Conversely, if there is a clopen that contains one but not the other they can’t be in the same connected component. Thus this map collapses all the connected components of into points of .

If this map is a homeomorphism, then no two points of are in the same connected component. Thus each singleton is a connected component, and we call the space “totally disconnected”. Clearly, such a space is in the image of the Stone space functor. On the other hand, if , then , and so this is both a necessary and a sufficient condition. Thus the “Stone spaces” form the full subcategory of , consisting of the totally disconnected compact Hausdorff spaces. Stone’s representation theorem shows us that this category is equivalent to the dual of the category of Boolean algebras.

As a side note: I’d intended to cover the Stone-Čech compactification, but none of the references I have at hand actually cover the details. There’s a certain level below which everyone seems to simply assert certain facts and take them as given, and I can’t seem to reconstruct them myself.

We conclude our coverage of Stone’s representation theorem with a version for Boolean -algebra. Each such algebra is isomorphic to a -algebra of subsets of some space, modulo a -ideal.

We start as we did for any Boolean algebra, by using the map sending to the Boolean algebra of clopen subsets of the Stone space . This algebra is, of course, our identified base. Let be the -ring generated by this base.

When we first dealt with measure rings, we quotiented out by the ideal of negligible sets. We don’t have a measure on , so we don’t have measurable sets, but we do have something almost as good. Just as when we discussed Baire spaces, we can use nowhere-denseness as a topological stand-in for negligibility. In fact, we’ll define a “meager” set to be any countable union of nowhere-dense sets, and we’ll let be the collection of all meager sets in . It is straightforward to verify that is a -ideal in .

A quick side note: classically, meager sets were said to be “of the first category”. Any other sets were said to be “of the second category”. This is the root of the term “category” in the Baire category theorem.

Now if is a sequence of clopen sets, then we can find a unique preimage . Since is a -algebra, we can take the countable union of these elements, and then apply to the result. That is, we can define the set

Now, of course, we can also take the countable union of the sets themselves. If were an isomorphism of -algebras, then this union would be exactly itself; but we aren’t usually so lucky. Instead, I say that the difference

Indeed, the countable union of the (open) sets is open, and so its complement is closed. The difference above is the intersection of the (closed) set with the (closed) complement of the union, and is thus closed. So if it were dense on some nonempty open set it would have to actually contain . But since is open it must be the union of some collection of basic clopen sets, and we can take to be one of these sets. That is, and for each . Since these relations only involve clopen sets, we find that and . But there’s no way this can happen if is the union of the !

So the map takes elements of to clopen sets in , and then on to their equivalence classes in , and this map commutes with countable unions. All that remains to show that this is an isomorphism is to show that no two clopen sets in represent the same equivalence class. That is, if and are distinct clopen sets, then cannot be meager. Equivalently, no nonempty clopen set is meager.

But this is just a consequence of the Baire category theorem, here in its formulation for compact Hausdorff spaces. Indeed, if a clopen set in any Baire space — and a compact Hausdorff space is Baire — were the countable union of closed nowhere-dense sets, then its interior would be empty. But since it’s open its interior is itself, and thus is would have to be empty. Thus if and are clopen sets representing the same equivalence class modulo then their (clopen) symmetric difference is meager, and thus empty. That is, .

We can extend yesterday’s result in the case that is a Boolean algebra. Now as a ring, has a unit. We adjust our definition of the Stone space to define

That is, we insist that the ring homomorphisms preserve the identity, sending the top element of to . This doesn’t really change anything we said yesterday, and it all goes through as before.

What is new is that the image of — the identified base for the topology on — consists of all the subsets of which are clopen — both open and closed. That is, elements of correspond to unions of connected components of .

First, we must show that is closed, since we already know that it’s open by definition. I say that the complement is actually the open basic set . Indeed, , and we calculate

Thus each set is the complement of an open set, and is thus closed as well.

It also happens that our base is closed under finite unions. Indeed, we use DeMorgan’s laws and calculate

And from there we can extend to any finite unions we want.

Now I say that if a base of clopen sets in a compact space is closed under finite unions, then it contains every clopen set in the space. Indeed, such a clopen set can be written as a union of sets in the base since it’s open. This union gives an open covering of the set. Since the set is closed, it is compact. And so the open covering we just found has a finite subcover. That is, we can write our clopen set as a finite union of basic sets, and so it is itself in the base by assumption.

Thus in our particular case, our base of consists of all the clopen sets in the Stone space, as we asserted!

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This is mainly an expository blath, with occasional high-level excursions, humorous observations, rants, and musings. The main-line exposition should be accessible to the “Generally Interested Lay Audience”, as long as you trace the links back towards the basics. Check the sidebar for specific topics (under “Categories”).

I’m in the process of tweaking some aspects of the site to make it easier to refer back to older topics, so try to make the best of it for now.